Group three found the surveillance room.
They found it because Jasper found it — Jasper, whose power was the specific reading of spaces and what they contained, the awareness that had been developing since New Orleans into something Thomas called structural intuition and Jasper called being able to feel where the important rooms were in a building, which was the same thing said differently.
He had stopped in the west corridor and said: in there, and Thomas had looked at the door he indicated and looked at Jasper and looked at the door again and opened it.
The surveillance room was not large.
A bank of monitors along one wall, each one showing a different section of the facility — corridors, rooms, the loading bay Dean's group had come through, the perimeter of the building with the tree line visible in the distance. A single chair in front of the monitors. No one in it.
"Where's the operator," Courtney said.
"Rounds," Thomas said, reading the monitors with the quick assessment of someone who had been in enough facilities to know their rhythms. "There's a pattern to the empty chair. They leave on a schedule." He looked at the timestamp in the corner of one screen. "We have approximately twelve minutes."
"Enough," Jasper said. He moved to the monitors without being asked and began scanning them with the methodical attention of someone who had learned to read a situation quickly and accurately and was now doing it for seventeen people simultaneously.
"There," Thomas said.
He pointed.
On the far right monitor, the lowest one, in a room that the camera showed from above — a wide angle, the room larger than any other on the screens — a man sat at a desk.
The camera angle made him small.
But the posture was unmistakable.
The scholar's posture. The pen moving. The lamp above him burning with the same quality it had burned with in every room Victor Glass had occupied since the notebook and the drawer and the something that waited in the edges of the light.
"Third floor," Jasper said, reading the indicator on the monitor. "East wing. Room at the end of the corridor."
"Is she there," Courtney said.
They all looked at the monitor.
The camera showed Victor and the desk and the lamp and the room around them. No one else visible.
But Courtney was not looking at the image.
She was looking at the space around the image. Her hands were loose at her sides and the Blood Magic was doing the thing it did when she was reading something at the edges of her range — the faint awareness in her face of something present that was not showing itself directly.
"She's there," Courtney said. "Not visible on the camera. But she's in that room." She paused. "She's very close to him. The tether is short — shorter than William thought. She can't move more than a room's width from him yet."
"That changes the approach," Thomas said.
"Yes," Courtney said. "We can't go for Victor without going for her simultaneously. They're in the same room."
Thomas looked at the monitor.
At Victor, small in the camera's wide angle, writing with the lamp above him.
"Signal the others," Thomas said. "All groups. We regroup after they've completed their objectives. Third floor, east corridor. Everything we find goes to one picture before we move."
He looked at Jasper.
"Good work," he said.
Jasper held the compliment the way he held compliments — receiving it, meaning it, not making it larger than Thomas had made it.
"Let's go," Jasper said.